Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Append menu is slow.
Keywords: AppendMenu menu slow efficiency
Message-ID: <7253@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 11 May 89 21:10:41 GMT
References: <89May9.171757edt.11077@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <554@biar.UUCP> <89May10.154646edt.10758@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 21

I agree with Robert Woodhead that you should not put that many items in
a menu.  Take a look at someone with tons of fonts using an application
with a Font menu sometime; it's horrible.  However, if you *do* want to
do this, Larry Rosenstein's suggestion should work, replacing the
defproc temporarily with one that ignores the calculate call.  However,
that requires modifying an internal Menu manager data structure
directly, and so it might break in the future (as Keith Rollins pointed
out in another connection).

I would suggest that you use your own MDEF resource, which is set up
*not* to draw the contents of the menu item.  Instead, make all the
menu items null or a blank space.  Inserting them should be easy.  Keep
the actual menu text in an external array or linked list and use that
in your drawing and calculating routines.  Turn off calculation during
your AppendMenu sequences.  This gives you speed, and does not require
dealing with internal data structures.  However, I will leave the issue
of communicating between the MDEF and the application as an (easy) exercise
for the reader.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"This signature is not to be quoted." -- Erland Sommarskog